I feel closer to this epic-maker Elder than to any other living filmmaker: and yet I feel an aesthetic opposition of such intensity that I’m certain I will be working the rest of life Uphill to offset this grand haunt with every visual means at my disposal. I embrace his making with all my heart (knowing full well the desperate honest integrity of the man, the sweet graciousness of him, the largesse of the gift he has given) for he and I are face-to-face in this beseeming meaningless turmoil of 20th-century Westward Ho-ing creativity, this Time long-shadowed by an impending darker age than ever before . . . Could I sing to Elder: “You take the Picture, and I’ll take the Aura: and we’ll neither of us outlive the current Horror.”
   Stan Brakhage, Telling Time, 124–125.

The most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s.
   Jonas Mekas

I am interested in how things go together and what keeps things apart, in divisions, borders, transitions, gradations—especially in the delicate ways in which one thing leads into another and in the ways in which things may be transformed from one state into another. Accordingly, in my films I have worked at exploring the potentials of camera movement, montage, and optical printing. That's a pretty broad statement, I realize, but it explains a lot about why my films are as they are.
   R. Bruce Elder, 1981.